Chris’ World

So full disclosure before we go down this road, the company I work for purchased Jungle Disk. Keep that in mind should it matter to you.

I’ve talked in the past about how important offsite backups are. They can be your lifeblood in the event of hardware failure or even a fire in your home. Regardless of the disaster, you should be backing up with an online backup service.

For the last year I’ve used Mozy’s Home service which provided “unlimited” data backups for a flat fee each month. $4.95 or $50 paid annually. I didn’t have any issues with Mozy’s service, but configuring the backup sets using the client was terrible. I don’t know if I just had too much data or what, but it was so cumbersome that I never bothered to change my backup set after the initial configuration.

With my anniversary on the horizon I decided to shop around and see if there was a suitable alternative to Mozy. One of the reasons I had considered moving was I was tossing around the idea of running Windows Server 2008 at home which disqualifies me for use of the Mozy Home service and requires me to use Mozy Pro at a significant price increase. Carbonite was the obvious alternative, but there was something minor that kept Carbonite from being the one. I can’t recall what it was at the present time.

A coworker asked if I had considered using Jungle Disk in conjunction with Cloud Files. The pricing model here is drastically different as you pay $2/month to use the Jungle Disk software and then you pay $.15/GB of data stored for the month. With between 20 and 30GB of files backed up, this could represent an increase in cost each month, but the price can fluctuate if I want it to. Likewise, the Jungle Disk client is AWESOME and it allows my remote data store to be mounted as a network drive ON MULTIPLE COMPUTERS. This allows me to share files across all my computers if I want to.

You can also use Jungle Disk with Amazon’s S3 data storage, but you incur additional costs since Amazon charges for storage as well as bandwidth. Just to clarify, Cloud Files is Rackspace’s competition to the S3 service. I’ve not used S3 so I’m not going to compare those individual services, but I know that the additional cost was going to add up as I backup my files daily.

If you aren’t backing up your data, and we both know that you should be, head on over to the Jungle Disk website and set yourself up an account. You’ll register and then install the software to complete the setup. Be sure to choose Cloud Files as your storage method.

Technobabble jungle disk, offsite backups

Last year I acquired an old G4 from a client of mine and had a friend donate some old aftermarket parts so I could get my feet wet with OSX. I’m enjoying it, but not ready to take that kind of financial hit for a computer. Last Fall I purchased a pink iPod Nano for Lauren to replace her aging Sansa. Shortly after that, we received an iPod Shuffle as a gift. It too was pink.

Today, I am going to pick up and iPhone for my wonderful wife. This is going to bring the total count of Apple products in my home to an astounding 4. This is madness. I’ve not gone out of my way to hate on Apple, but I’ve never bought into the idea of paying a premium for a trendy brand name. As the products have become more affordable I’ve slowly started to acquire them. I’m kind of enjoying their ease of use, but I’m not quite ready to jump on the Apple bandwagon and pretend they are the end all, be all of electronics.

Life in General, Technobabble apple, iphone

I’ve been a developer for nearly a decade now. The last 6+ have been spent coding for the web, primarily in PHP. You could say that I am fairly confident in my abilities. I’ve started to prepare to take the Zend Certified Engineer exam, which just gives me a way to prove my knowledge of the PHP language.

As a first step, I took a sample test today and while I passed without any problems, there were far too many concepts that I was either unfamiliar with or had zero knowledge of. Granted, most PHP developers will never venture into these areas, it was a very humbling experience. I’m going to be devoting the next few weeks to the preparation of taking the exam so things over here will probably be light, but no worse than they’ve been over the last few weeks.

I do have a handful of funny quotes from Ethan that I am trying to compile in my mind and prep for posting. That kid is a riot.

Life in General, Technobabble ethan, php, zce

I’ve been in the IT industry for a long time, but it’s usually not until you’ve lost some significant files or data that you truly become vigilant about your backup routine. In my case, it was my son triggering a format of an SD card containing 3 months of pictures that drove me to setup automated offsite backups of all of my data.

I work at a managed hosting company and I see far too many emails from coworkers about recovering data that they thought was backed up to external drives. I no longer support the idea of doing local backups to external drives. They are too prone to failure and the peace of mind with an offsite backup in a large redundant storage array is much more comforting.

With that said, where can you do this and how much will it cost? I personally use Mozy Home Backup, but have heard good things from Carbonite. Mozy will allow you up to 2GB of free backup space or you can pay the $4.95/month per computer and backup an unlimited amount of data. Backups run daily and you can restore files via the web or pay to have your files archived to DVD and mailed to you. I am currently backing up nearly 50GB of data.

Carbonite seems to be an identical product offering multi-year discounts where Mozy will let you pay monthly or give you a discount for paying for a year up front. Pricing is available here for Mozy and here for Carbonite.

Everyone should be doing this with their financial data, pictures, and video. The last thing you want is to have your computer stolen or your house burn down and lose all of your memories. I know that since I set this up, the only thing of value inside my home is my family. My data and memories are protected from everything but a massive disaster that affects my home as well as the datacenter where my data is backed up, which is not all that likely.

Sign up today and if you don’t, don’t ask me to recover your data for you when it’s gone.

Technobabble backups, carbonite, mozy